Star Trek Deck Building Game: The Next Generation – Next Phase

This is a standalone expansion to the Star Trek Deck Building Game series so you can play with this by itself or combine it with the Premiere Edition for a richer experience.

You are the Captain of a small Starship with a standard crew and basic weaponry. Will you use your crew’s experience to improve your ships systems or to recruit more experienced crewmen to your ship? Will you form diplomatic relationships or conquer civilizations in battle? Build your deck and explore the Star Trek universe!

Play these different scenarios or create your own!

Free For All Exploration – Explore the universe, interact with alien races, complete missions and experience the mysteries of space. Gain knowledge and power to become a legendary Captain!

Teams Reunification – Team-up and determine if you are in favor of peace or war in the Alpha Quadrant! What will be the future of the Federation?

Co-op Borg Invasion II – “I am the Borg.” This time the Borg Queen has arrived to assimilate planet Earth! Work with your fellow players to defeat the Borg and the Queen.

User Reviews (1)

This was the first Deck Building Game I played. Even though I watched a lot of playthroughs and reviews of other Deck Builders Star Trek was one I liked better than the most. First reason of course was being a Star Trek TNG fan in my youth. Second reason was the possibility to have really different scenarios in this game. But more to that in the Gameplay section.
When I bought this game I actually wanted to buy the First Edition of this game but it wasn’t available. So I tried my luck with this one.

Components:

The box comes with 300 cards in good quality and really nice pictures from the TV Show and the movies (First Contact for the Borg Scenario). To sort your different decks of cards there are a few cardboard and foam dividers within the box. In addition you get five 20-sided dice to keep track of your ships damage. Everything is of high value and there is enough room for some expansions left.

Gameplay:

You start with a few common crew members and standard maneuvers in your deck. Throughout the game you will get to buy new crew members and more powerful maneuvers and setups from the Star Base. New ships however you will only get when you start exploring space cards from the space deck and using diplomacy to get these new starships. But beware, most times you will be facing different things when exploring the space deck. Missions, Events or Battles. Be sure to have a good crew in your hand to play when things go bad.
What I really like about the Star Trek Deck Building Game are the different scenarios you can choose to play. The standard exploring and mission solving scenario is one where you can slowly build your ship and crew and then try to go on missions and score points. Ok, you have to be faster than your opponent but there’s not to much pressure there. A different kind of scenario is the one against the Borg. Here you have to work with the other players to fight the Borg Cards from the space deck which strike every turn and get stronger with every Borg Card you defeat. In the last scenario about the reunification of romulans and vulcans you split in two teams. One side tries to reunify and bring peace while the other side tries to sabotage the whole attempt. For now I never played this scenario but it sounds really interesting when playing with more than 2 players.

Replay Value:

Through your decisions which characters you choose to buy your deck will offer you a variety of different strategies. With the three different scenarios even more change comes to the came. This game alone has good replay value but as you can combine it with the first edition with complete different cards and three other scenarios the replayability even gets bigger.

Pros:

– the Star Trek flair really comes across
– nice mechanic to have characters have different abilities and at the same time add different attributes to you flagship
– challenging scenarios (I like the Borg one especially)
– as far as I know the rules are better written and more balanced than in the first edition

Cons:

– no board (you have to play on a blank table or print out your own board)
– strange feeling to only get new ships while finding them “somewhere in space”
– there are only alternate versions of the main characters in this box (for trekkies: the Lieutenant version of Picard or the Major Rakal version of Troi)
– no Enterprise-D in this box 😉

Last Words:

For solo players this box may not really be the best thing to buy unless you have no problem with playing against yourself with two decks. I tried the Exploring scenario for example and without an opponent there is no challenge. You build your crew to perfection and win every mission later. But as soon as you play with two or more players it really is a lot of fun. For my personal playing experience I like co-op better than battling against each other but that’s my opinion in most of the games.

So if you are a Star Trek Fan and/or like Deck Building Games or even just want to start with Deck Building Games I can recommend this game. It’s quite easy to learn and offers fun and variety for a lot of plays.

Best wishes,
Blaine101

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